There’s a marked difference between what the community accepts as meta and what is actually required. See “+4 AD 1k+ IO SCORE MINIMUM” and such. I’m not against it, but expecting people to be accepting of a mechanically inferior thing by and large just because the players themselves can be inferior and/or the skill cap is low is being ignorant of player bases.
Even scrubs in elo hell in LoL still complain about people not being meta with picks. It happens in every game for a vast majority of the community, even if that community could succeed without the meta.